Paul Novosad
@paulnovosad
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econ prof @dartmouth, founder https://t.co/zBuCmMUmPy. r2: "a morass of disjointed streams of consciousness" 🤷
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Joined January 2012
📣 New working paper on residential segregation in India. We’ve been working for 5 years on this. 8 facts about residential segregation in India, from new administrative data. The situation is not great 🧵 1/N
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What kind of childhood makes a top scientist? Is it enough to have all the right traits (brilliance, grit, etc) or do you need the right family too?. And why should we care? A 🧵 on our paper on the Nobel Laureates. A teaser: the income distribution of the laureates' fathers.1/N
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I knew scientists were territorial but this is next level. Remember Katalin Karikó, the unsung hero of mRNA vaccines? Her advisor Robert Suhadolnik tried to have her deported when she accepted a competing offer in another lab.
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Corporate landlords are pretty good actually. The real terrors are the ones who own 2–3 houses.
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Fascinating paper on where 6000 global elites went to college. Billionaires, CEOs, heads of state, central bankers, etc. In a word: Harvard. Fully 10% of global elites went to Harvard. Elite US schools are over-represented (23% IvyPlus), but nobody comes close to Harvard. 🧵
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A new India-China fact (to me):. The Chinese state prioritized primary education over secondary/tertiary, while the Indian state did the opposite. Chinese primary enrollment rate passed India in 1950, secondary 1975, and tertiary only in 2000!
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Why we should care: science is arguably the most important force for human progress, maybe by a lot. More discoveries, better lives for all of us. If there’s a kid who could make a foundational discovery, we want to make sure they don’t spend their lives in the mines. 2/N
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Dartmouth's student government held an open "no confidence" vote on the president's handling of campus protests. It passed (no confidence) 13-2 (with 3 abstensions). Then they repeated with a secret ballot. It failed 8-9 (2 abstensions). 1/2.
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What gets you into a top college is being above some moderate competence bar, and then, from like 8th grade or earlier, organizing your life around getting into a top college. Very few 8th graders have this level of motivation, so we mainly select on parent characteristics.
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Wow, quite the story. 👇🏻👇🏻. Founding Arxiv is apparently not good for your academic career. Good evidence that improving how science works is insufficiently incentivized.
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🤷🤷♀️New data: SHRUG 2 is out!! @devdatalab has been working on this for two years, a HUGE update to India’s coolest data platform:.1. Maps of *every* 2011 town and village, with ids.2. All data at every geography (villages, districts, ACs, etc). 🧵1/N
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Re-upping this story about how Katalin Karikó's advisor threatened to have her deported if she moved labs.
I knew scientists were territorial but this is next level. Remember Katalin Karikó, the unsung hero of mRNA vaccines? Her advisor Robert Suhadolnik tried to have her deported when she accepted a competing offer in another lab.
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Behavioral econ is cool, but once we admitted people are irrational, it seems wrong to end up with 50x more work on "we must help people with tiny nudges," vs. "Oh shit, firms must be taking advantage of people like crazy with this stuff.".
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The Latinx polling paper is excellent, but reaches the wrong conclusion. It has almost nothing to do with queerphobia, Latino voters just don’t like being called LatinX. Politicians using the term "Latinx" lose 6 PERCENTAGE POINTS vote share. A 🧵👇🏻.1/N.
Amanda and I think we should still be using gender-inclusive language. The problem for Democrats is that segments of the Latino community that are queerphobic and would otherwise support them are less likely to do so if queerness is made salient through inclusive language 7/n.
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Here's the core idea: If talent is uniformly distributed and opportunity is equal, then Nobelists will come out of the woodwork, from random families & places. If every laureate is born rich, or in the West, or has a teacher mom, it means a lot of our geniuses are being missed.
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I've lately reviewed many papers that *feel* p-hacked. Some clues: results implausibly large, operate at the wrong unit of observation, too perfect, etc. A couple of specific author teams are doing this very systematically. I think this is a canary in the coal mine. 🧵 1/N.
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Is there a theoretical basis for being comfortable with charging men more for car insurance? It's statistical discrimination, it's clear why firms do this, and it seems fine with me. But do we have a theory for deciding which forms of statistical discrimination we are fine with?
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I've been telling people about this paper for a while, it's sooooo neat. Prayers for rain only "work" in places where the probability of rain is increasing in the length of the dry spell ---> so these places have more religious belief.
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They are not universally from elite families — take Daniel Tsui, the child of illiterate farmers from Henan China. He somehow made it to Augustana College in Illinois, the University of Chicago, and Bell Labs, where he made Nobel-worthy discoveries in quantum physics. 9/N
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The father occupation that is the most common for a Nobel Laureate: business owner! Some large businesses, but also a lot of small ones. Doctors, professors, engineers are also common, and more disproportionate relative their population share. 11/N
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When you hear how many people say or support something, you always have to understand the social dynamics in which these "votes" take place. Many institutional and social structures are suppressing people's true opinions. 2/2.
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Live-tweeting @karthik_econ's presentation on state capacity at NEUDC. Simple story of India's economy:.- Top 10% drives demand and growth.- Next 30-40% in service sector jobs supporting the top 10%.- remaining 50% left out, supported by welfare programs. Seems suboptimal 1/n
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RCT reducing leisure screen time among adults and adolescents to *<3 hours per week*. Compliance was high — they exchanged smartphones for flip phones. Results:.- 45 mins more physical activity per day.- Better mood and well-being (adults).- Fewer behavioral issues (kids)
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Or Har Gobind Khorana, the child of a village taxation clerk, the only literate family in a little village in Punjab. He made it to Liverpool, Cambridge, and finally Wisconsin, where he did foundational work on how DNA is translated into proteins. 10/N
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Women face a lot of barriers in the sciences, especially in our sample cohorts (~1835–1975). Only 28/735 laureates are women. Female laureates come from more elite backgrounds — suggesting family advantages made up for some of the barriers faced by women in the sciences. 15/N
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The average ed rank of a Nobel laureate father was 95 in 1901, and is 88 today. For the optimists: we’re creating opportunity for twice as many people as we used to!. For the pessimists: it will be another 688 years before we get to the benchmark equal opportunity rank of 50!
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For every laureate, we identified the predicted education and income rank of their fathers. (We found data on 715/739 laureates in the sciences). Looks like we can reject that uniform distribution idea — about half come from the top 5%. 8/N
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So how is our society doing at finding and supporting the potential scientists who can improve this precarious existence?. Our idea was to look at the childhoods of the Nobel Laureates. Virtually all of them reached the pinnacle of discovery — where did they come from?. 3/N.
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We researched the childhood background of every laureate in the sciences. We excluded Peace and Literature, since those committees sometimes intentionally select people who were born poor — doesn’t happen in the sciences. (We included econ, cue the not-a-real-Nobel truthers) 6/N.
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🚨Please stop calling this brain drain. When there are high overseas returns to education, *more people get educated*. Think about all the folk working their asses off for this exam, and then *staying in India*. High returns for migrants are good, they build human capital. 1/N.
Out of the 1,000 top scorers on the entrance exam for the Indian Institutes of Technology, 36% have migrated eight years later (primarily to the US). Out of the top 100, 62%. Out of the top 10, 90%.
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By every measure, Nobel laureates born in the United States come from less elite backgrounds than laureates born elsewhere. 17/N
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Thank god, I was really worried about the anesthesiologists, I've heard many of them live paycheck-to-paycheck. A lot of people don't seem to be understanding what has happened here.
BREAKING: Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield reverses decision to put a time limit on anesthesia
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📣📣 New data alert: we @devdatalab are releasing open village and town maps for all of India. Find them at the top link here: We wrote a post with some more details about the maps: @thesamasher @tobylunt. 1/5.
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I'm just so sad that so many progressives have abandoned the ideal that we shouldn't treat people differently based on their skin color. I'm baffled people are willing to defend this. I don't think this is getting us to a better place.
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Stephen Jay Gould’s concern is as important today as it was in 1980. Brilliant people, with the potential to make world-changing scientific discoveries, are living and dying in poverty, without ever getting the chance to nurture their talents. 26/N
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We are letting our allies down. Exporting 100% of our AstraZeneca is a no-brainer at this point.
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Wild study:. 1. Desired # of kids is highly unstable, and goes up as you get older.2. But people think their desires are stable.3. When recalling, you claim it's what you always wanted. Takeaway: It's hard to make rational decisions about # of kids. ht: @Ingar30
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Which world region has been the best at nurturing top scientists from ordinary families? We thought it might be Eastern Europe, with its Soviet mass education. But in fact it is the land of opportunity 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 16/N
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A 🧵 on our work on US mortality change, just out in AEJ:App, with @thesamasher and @charlierafkin. We ask: how concentrated is the U.S. pre-Covid mortality crisis? Is everyone doing a little worse, or is a small subset doing catastrophically worse?. The graph is a spoiler 1/N
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Good wikipedia nugget about today's nobel winner Carolyn Bertozzi.
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Reasons you are probably overestimating the probability that Twitter dies:.1. Platforms die when their audience leaves. Twitter audience is bigger than ever. 2. Platforms survive longer than you think. MySpace, Tumblr, Flickr, even AOL are still alive. 1/N.
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Our study on excess mortality in India is out:. Excess deaths close to 3 million. 1. Far higher than official totals. 2. Implies global COVID death count off by >2 million (and more given undercounting elsewhere). Short 🧵.
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Pfizer is creating hundreds of billions of dollars of social value, and stockholders have earned about a 5% return since Jan 2020.
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RCT introduction of a pollution market in Surat, Gujarat. Pollution fell by 20–30%, and efficiently — gains came from the firms who could cut pollution most effectively. Mortality benefits are *25 times* costs. An incredible state/research collaboration. 1/2
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In economic history, the best measure of a kid’s childhood is often the father’s occupation. It predicts SES, and is often the only thing you can find. Moms occupations are more sparse in the historical record, and many are housewives, which doesn’t tell you much about SES. 7/N.
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This is work with @thesamasher, @eni_iljazi (PhD student at Wharton) and Catriona Farquharson (predoc at Princeton). You can read the full paper here: 4/N.
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Only 3% of laureates grew up on farms — like this year’s Medicine winner, Victor Ambros (also from Hanover & Dartmouth, woot woot!). Other notable laureates from farming families: David Card, Frederick Banting, Alexander Fleming. 12/N
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Striking differences in what kind of bachelors degree people are getting from the Chinese and Indian education systems. India: Humanities, Law and Business dominate, Science and Engineering are only recent. China: Engineering, Engineering, and Engineering
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A couple of ideas:.1. People work harder when their outcomes aren’t guaranteed.2. We get better allocation of talent when there is a lot of economic churn. Causation isn’t correlation, so put this one into “food for thought”. 21/N.
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But it's consistent with other theory and evidence that increasing access to opportunity makes a better society for everyone, not just the poor people getting more opportunities. 22/N.
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Since we have 125 years of prize data, we can ask whether we have gotten any better at creating access for brilliant people from less elite backgrounds. These graphs show the father income and education ranks over time. 13/N
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@kaseyklimes 6:1 in favor, based on the replies so far. if we can get to n=30, it will be data.
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I like these article highlights — Elsevier showing they can still add value to the publication process.
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More surprisingly, we get more laureates in places with more *downward mobility*. When there is lots of churn, and children from rich families are not guaranteed to be rich, we produce more top scientists. 19/N
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What a graph! High-income parents teach their children independence, low-income parents teach obedience. Source: WVS via Acemoglu. Theory: parents teach traits that are optimal for the expected work evironment of their kids— limiting upward mobility.
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To me, this is a pretty clear sign that global leadership is very unmeritocratic. To a first order, going to an elite college is a function of choices made by kids' parents, not the kids themselves. Talented parents may have more talented kids, but there's no way the talent.
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In the global income distribution, the average Nobel laureate comes from a family at the 94th percentile — implying that 90% of global scientific talent is not achieving its potential. And this measure has barely improved at all in 125 years. 25/N
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U.S. working hours per year are lower than they have ever been. The thing that is demanding your constant, full attention and dysregulating your nervous system is your iPhone.
Capitalism demands our full attention, working constantly. It doesn’t give us room to actually be human, feel feelings, or take time to breathe. It makes it so our nervous system is always dysregulated. This isn’t sustainable, dude. We can’t keep living this way.
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We dug deeper into those U.S. born laureates, by linking their birth places to the Opportunity Atlas. Not surprisingly, we get more laureates from non-elite families in places with more upward mobility. (We also get more laureates overall from these places) 18/N
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We address genetics, bias in prize committees, contributions to society outside of the sciences, among others. I’ll post another thread on some of these in a bit. 28/27.
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What we need is the Cheesecake Factory, but for landlords.
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Fact 1: India is very segregated. Urban places are about as segregated as rural places, for Scheduled Castes. For Muslims, segregation is worse in cities. The graph shows the Dissimilarity Index for cities and subdistricts.
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One last thing. All our work so far is looking only at fathers’ occupations, NOT at birth countries. But the child of a tailor in India has far fewer life opportunities than the child of a tailor in the U.S., especially in earlier birth cohorts. 23/N.
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My preliminary takeaway from the 3-year cash transfer study:. Poverty is a lot more than just not having enough cash. Many factors interact to keep people in a bad equilibrium. Once you're in that equilibrium, cash transfers alone don't change your steady state. 1/N.
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I understand the academic impetus to move to a new platform. But I think it is bad for the commons if all the academics disappear and only talk to each other. We need your good ideas to be shared widely as much we ever did.
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Fact 2: Scheduled Castes and Muslims are about as segregated as Black people in U.S. cities. Note this dissimilarity graph is slightly different from the prior, b/c we limit to cities >100k to match U.S. Census definitions. 5/N
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I find it wild that people out there think that essays are more egalitarian than exam scores.
Wow: “He started by editing college essays from his Yale dorm room for $50 an hour but now charges the parents of his company’s 190 clients $120,000 a year to help them create a narrative he believes will appeal to college-admissions officers.”
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We are getting better at creating pathways for high potential people to succeed in the sciences. But we have a long to way to go. Read the paper for more details: N/N
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India still produces more Master degrees (but China more doctorates).2/n
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TurboTax is an influential lobby in favor of keeping taxes difficult, to drive demand for their product. How much would it cost a philanthropist to fund an open-source alternative to drive TurboTax out of business and open to door to tax simplification?.
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I'm surprised I haven't seen this paper until now (by @mikekofoed). Clean RCT of zoom- vs. in-person-school: 38 sections, same class (intro econ), same time slot, same instructor. Zoom students did 0.2 SD worse.
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Making your paper general interest by taking the country name out of the abstract.
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Counterpoint: it's extremely useful to get quantitative estimates of how policies impact human health.
This is a perfect example of why so much social science is nonsense. You don’t need a study for this. Just ask anyone with a passing familiarity with marijuana: “hey do you think legal weed will increase the number of people who play video games and eat snacks all day?” Uh…yes?.
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In the long run, I think we fix this by requiring transparent data and code replication sites before submission. But this feels a long way distant, in between I think a lot of fraud is going uncaught. N/N.
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Michael Kremer could be the first economist to win two nobel prizes, the first for RCTs in development, the second for advance market commitments for vaccines.
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Nice to see our paper on 30-year U.S. mortality change covered in Matt Yglesias' newsletter today with a very clear summary. The U.S. is not experiencing a widespread malaise, it's a concentrated catastrophe among the least educated.
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This is really neat: Community Notes work because they estimate users' political preferences and upweight notes that are liked by users of all stripes. I wonder if other parts of our democracy could be improved with mechanisms like this.
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Fact 3: Muslims are more likely to live in highly segregated neighborhoods. 26% of urban Muslims live in neighborhoods that are >80% Muslim. 17% of urban SCs live in neighborhoods that are >80% SC. Numbers in rural areas are similar. 6/N
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Fact 5: Public services in cities are less likely to be found in neighborhoods with many SCs and Muslims. A 100% Muslim neighborhood is only half as likely to have a secondary school as a neighborhood with no Muslims. 10/N
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This is interesting! Why do we produce more successful scientists when rich kids seem to do worse — especially when scientists mostly come from rich families?.20/N.
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My friends from Yale have long claimed it's about getting into Harvard or Yale, and it doesn't matter much between them. Maybe Princeton too. Friends, the data points for Yale are not even high enough to get labeled. If there is a #2, it is Stanford. 5/N
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Our current peer review system isn't robust to blatant cheating. The Ariely types uncovered based on different fonts in Excel sheets are probably outliers — the successful frauds are usually better at covering their tracks. 3/N.
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Somebody should community note this. It's not what he said. I'm all for Harris (duh), but if our side is using the same misinformation tactics as the right, we are not winning.
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People dunking on this too quickly, "correlation is not causation", "we don't vote count studies", etc. *Not every important question can be answered with a perfect RCT*. For decades, the cigarette-cancer link was similarly correlational, based on case studies, etc. 🧵 1/N.
A review in Nature, by @candice_odgers, asserts that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that “there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.” Both of these assertions are untrue.
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Last, this is why descriptive work is underrated. No preposterous IV, no incomprehensible structural model, just a new fact about the world. If the descriptive work is done well — and it is not easy — the fact permanently enters everyone's headspace and must be contended with.
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A+ Intro Econ content right here.
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Proposal for a new residential building in New York spanning the East River
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A key discovery of the RCT revolution in development was that most programs did not work as they were supposed to. But when I get asked to referee papers these days, it's always about a low-cost intervention with transformational effects. I don't know what to make of it. 1/n.
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Same thing in teacher investment. Chinese pupil-teacher ratios in India pass India in 1950, secondary in 1970, and tertiary not at all
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Among U.S. nationals, it’s even more stark. Harvard represents 16% of elites — literally off the chart. 3/N
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It's mainly: did parents steer the kid's energy into activities that build a college CV. Some of these activities involve real human capital accumulation, like Russian math. Too many of them, like starting NGOs, writing research papers, stints overseas, are mainly signaling.
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Many important aspects of tarrifs are not captured by the std econ model:. 1. They're gonna retaliate, it's going to be worse for everyone.2. We will not get some optimal set of smart tariffs. Tariffs will be chosen for political reasons, with many opportunities for corruption.
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